Ecuador. Venezuela. Cuba. That's just in Latin America. South Africa and India have never been our puppets. Quite a few countries near Hong Kong are not susceptible to US pressure. It's not like the Vietnamese remember us with fondness.
And keep in mind that he chose Hong Kong to start the saga. He wasn't forced to go there by the FBI. He knows Chinese, and HK is one of the few places Chinese is spoken that can called both a Democracy and not a US ally, so that's a sensible reason to pick Hong Kong, but why go through Moscow when you're leaving? Hell, why leave at all?
I'm not saying I have evidence he betrayed us to Russia and should be shot on sight, what I'm saying is there's no way to rule this out as long as he's in Russia and his leaks seem focused on outing the US and Five Eyes rather then the Russians.
Keep in mind that we still don't have the minutes of the Constitutional Convention, that the Federal right to classify information is enshrined in the Constitution, and that the "government by the people, and for the people," guy kept loads of secrets, etc.
Americans are very naive in believing that the main point of the Constitution is to protect freedom. That's BS. The main point is to protect these United States from other, nastier governments. Whenever there's a conflict between freedom and that goal the Constitution is firmly on the side of government, which is why they had to enact those Amendments in the Bill of Rights.
Of course the US population wants us to spy on every country. We are not some pansy Aristocratic Monarchy which only wins through honorable behavior. We are the United States, and we win because we cheat. George Washington never won a fair fight in his life. Bobby Lee fought fair, and lost half his Army to a guy who didn't fight at all (Bill Sherman), and the other half to a guy (Grant) who won mostly by knowing the best place to throw bodies. So the American people don't think we should stop tapping foreign leaders phones. We get kinda embarrassed about Angie Merkell because she seems like a nice lady and we don't want to remind her of the Stasi, but we won't stop tapping her phone. We are America, our unofficial motto is "trust, but verify", we will cheat our asses off (just ask the American Indians, there's a reason they gave up on reforming us and became citizens in the 20s), and if you don't like it you should probably support a European superstate because that's the only thing that can stop us.
Now if you did a poll and asked about mass data collection I doubt Americans would put it in the same "of course we cheat" category, but this article isn't about arresting Snowden for the mass data collection. It's about the spying on foreign officials, outing our techniques in Pakistan, etc. And that shit is firmly in "of course we cheat."
If a police officer hears about a suspect who claims to have acted from altruistic motives, but also said his action happened 6-7 years after he was first horrified by the bad shit; he's gonna be incredibly skeptical. It just sounds like something a bad guy would say to get off. If it's three months he's gonna trust that story more.
So, yeah, Kaplan could have been a shade more accurate. But he didn't shade the truth to support his point.
Just another example of American exceptionalism: Snowden should not have divulged America's illegal activities outside the US because we're special; we can do no wrong. What a bunch of self-righteous bigots.
Apparently you didn't read the article. He explicitly said he didn't give a shit one way or the other about Snowden's revelations of illegal activity. And he's actually more extreme then you are because he included spying on non-Americans as "illegal."
The problem is that most of what Snowden revealed is legal, even in his sense of the term. The US government's job is to know what other governments are doing, therefore it has the power to spy on them. They, in turn, have the power to spy on it. We can argue the ethics of tapping Angie Merkel's phone all day, but you can't argue that there is a single law which gives a Head of Government the right not to be spied on.
If you ignore the fact that the "islamists" are mostly fighting the US with the arms the US gave them then what you say almost makes sense.
Almost.
#1 That's not as true as you imply. All Taliban and Iraqi insurgent arms are Soviet-made. Some proportion of those were paid for with U$, but that was generally decades ago when we were fighting another war with a much different enemy.
#2 That's not uncommon with insurgent movements. While we were fighting in 'Nam with heavily armored vehicles the Portuguese were fighting in their African colonies with horse cavalry. In both wars most weapons used by the rebels were originally "acquired" from government sources, so the Portuguese faced significantly less firepower then us. In some ways it would have made a lot more sense for us to arm the South Vietnamese with Pre-WW2 weapons and not send in our boys with M-16s, but it's very hard for a Democracy to send troops into battle with inferior equipment. Their families tend to object.
The problem with that strategy is geography doesn't protect against little raids like S11, the Islamists seem to have strong support in their own countries, and certain bits of Western culture (notably the fact that sex is everywhere and women are empowered) enrage them.
In other words if we're annoying them with a constant barrage of Beyonce from VoA they ain't gonna bother conquering the Swedes, they will join Al Qaeda.
You do realize this is real life, not a circuit? It doesn't have a logical state. It's analog, and messy, and we have to deal with it using our mushy monkey-brains as best we can.
And with all that highfaluting thinking, you missed Kaplan's main point: You don't grant a guy clemency until you know what he's accused of doing.
And we don't know that Snowden didn't intend to end up in Russia. We don't know that he is telling the truth when he assures us he hasn't told the Russians jack-squat. If he did tell the Russians things we don't know if they tortured him or not. We can't know that shit until after he's someplace we trust, answering some very detailed questions for the Feds.
What we do know is that he chose a flight that went through Russia, he chose not to reveal any information on Russian spying but to reveal pretty much every spy operation the US has ever done, and we know that while hiding out in a country whose definition of "freedom" is only jailing you for a year instead of two he's claiming he did all these things solely to protect freedom.
The author has actually supported several of the leaks.
His problems are the leaks about US spy operations on various non-US governments, which are perfectly legal; and revelations about information-gathering in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
And you're totally ignoring one of his main points: If Snowden is in Russia, and the Russians can threaten to shoot him (or even just send him back to the US), why would we believe him that he hasn't snitched on our Russian assets to them? Given that he chose to go there, and he hasn't hampered their operations at all despite the fact he clearly had access to that information (the NSA's job is to recognize enemy signals, which means they have to have info on the signals the Russians send when they spy on us, which in turn means the NSA has to know pretty much every Russian spy op we suspect); why is everyone assuming he is telling the Gospel truth?
I'm not saying he should be charged, but there definitely needs to be an investigation. And until the investigation happens clemency would be silly.
Of course it's illegal to give anyone who is not currently on active duty the "Bradley Manning treatment." If you read the Constitution the Fifth amendment explicitly do not apply to AD troops.
A major reason I'm skeptical of privacy advocates is they claim to be defending our Constitutional system, but all of them act shocked that an AD soldier had fewer Constitutional rights then OJ Simpson, despite the fact the actual Constitution is explicitly designed to deny AD soldiers those rights.
Some of the revelations, however, while detailing operations that are technically legal, do paint the organzation in a light that shows it to be an unchecked body with too much power and not enough supervision.
The NSA is perfectly within control of the President and the Judges the Chief Justice has appointed to the FISA Court. It is following the will of most of Congress.
It's not the NSA's fault that you think the people in control are wrong.
The specific examples listed in the article may not be under the above category. Still, it is not clear who did the sifting through and filtering the material to decide what gets published. If Snowden did none of it, than those can be chalcked down to "collateral damage". If the bulk of the material is relevant for a whistle blower, I'd still go with clemancy.
Clearly you're not a cop. Snowden released all kinds of info that will hurt the US. Some if it protects your privacy rights. Most of it simply forced various foreign governments to pretend they didn't know they were being spied on. these governments clearly don't like that he released the info because only a handful of them will even consider giving him Asylum.
Shachar P.s. Not that I, as a non-US citizen, or even resident, have a real say on the matter.
One of the annoying things about being American is that everyone insists that a) their country, which is too small to do anything, is moral because it's too small to hurt anyone; b) America must do something about everything; and c) what America has done is clearly BS and thank God I'm in a small country that can never do anything. In this case America was given the thorny problem of leading the world in a war against Terrorists, which is rather difficult because they hide, and the world is extremely unhappy that the solution to finding them involved storing lots of data.
I'm not saying that the solution the NSA picked is optimal or even acceptable. I'm just saying that it is a huge pain in the ass that everyone insists that we do every-goddamn-thing and then acts all morally superior because sometimes when you do shit it turns out wrong.
If you want your country to be as influential as America you can easily get that. You just have to be willing to give up the smallish country you live in for a larger country. A European Super-state would have more claim to global leadership then the US. A Latin American superstate would be nearly as powerful as the US.
The disadvantage is that you'd actually have to do stuff, which means that a) you'd have to buy expensive military hardware instead of F-16s which were designed to be second-line aircraft in the 70s, and b) some of the stuff you did would turn out wrong and everyone would yell at you.
But there're plenty of places to flee that are neither Russia, nor American friends. Greenwald is quite happy in Brazil. Lots of Latin American states are both significantly freer then Russia and would be very happy to piss on Obama with Snowden.
Kaplan's point isn't that Snowden's presence in Russia is proof that he guilty of giving them information, he's saying it's enough that Snowden should be thoroughly investigated before being allowed back into the country. In legal terms rather then being "evidence beyond a reasonable doubt," it's "probable cause."
Since any statement he makes from Russia is difficult to trust (Putin could kill him tomorrow if he wanted), the investigation can't even start until he's back in the US, which means that saying "come back to the US for amnesty" is really premature.
Snowden could have been an Ellsberg; instead he chose to take his information to China and Russia.
No, he chose to take *himself* to China and Russia, and I can't say I blame him.
One would have to assume is the first things those country's intelligence agencies would do is get their hands on his files.
Except they didn't, because Snowden didn't take his files with him, at least not unencrypted.
So you're saying that because Snowden says "Putin's men did not threaten to castrate me if I didn't come up with an unencrypted thumb drive, therefore I didn't have Greenwald FedEx me one" then he clearly hasn't done that shit?
Kaplan's point isn't that Snowden is an evil man who should be shot without trial, or even that he should be put on trial, it's that we have to have fairly lengthy and complex investigation, in which Snowden is clearly out of the control of Russia, before we can decide whether a trial is warranted.
He could refuse; but then again they could simply bundle him up and ship him back to the US and core political points.
Are you kidding? This is their best propaganda coup in the past twenty years. They're not going to screw it up even if they don't get access to Snowden's files.
What makes you think the propaganda coup gets worse for them if Snowden "disappears" on a day trip and re-appears at hearing in Federal Court?
about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls 'worldwide,' an effort that 'allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.'
Yes, it's essential to national security that we "look for", identify, and if necessary kill, any and all "unknown associates" of Ms. Merkel!
It doesn't prove Snowden is in the right, but when the NSA's proponents can't string together one paragraph summarizing the "good" programs Snowden's compromised without this sort of thing, you can be pretty damn sure NSA is so far wrong it's not funny.
So you're saying Al Qaeda doesn't count as a "known intelligence target?" Wouldn't it make sense for the US to have a list of known AQ terrorists, and then when they detect a guy who spends time with multiple of those terrorists, maybe they should keep an eye on him? What about the KGB's successor the FSB?
The program Kaplan mentions is a lot more useful for those guys then monitoring Merkel because Merkel is a Head of Government. She's not gonna go to clandestine meetings herself.
Apparently you don't pay much attention to the details of this scandal.
The entire point of the NSA is Signals Intelligence. that means intercepting and decoding signals. You can't do that if you don't have some idea how the other guys operate, which means the NSA has to have some idea how the Russians and Chinese operate. Moreover Snowden was actually a guy they depended on to train their other guys on Chinese tactics. So Snowden doesn't actually need documents to say a lot about the Chinese, because it's in his head; and he could have gotten pelnty of docs on the Russians if he'd wanted.
Whether Snowden could release the info we have on them without destroying our intelligence apparatus is both countries is an interesting question, but it seems to me that if he wanted to hurt them he could release some fraction of what we've got as disinformation.
Snowden is a civilian not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. He couldn't be sent to GitMo because he's never had direct contact with terrorists.
His trial would be in the US Courts, and it would be every bit the circus of OJ's trial.
Did you read your own source? Yeah the Feds TRIED to railroad Drake, but they lost. This is because we are not Russia and the Courts are not a rubberstamp.
Not that I, as a non-US citizen, or even resident, have a real say on the matter.
Not that I, as a US citizen, have a real say on the matter either.
You have plenty of say.
It's just that to exercise that say you would have to convince several hundred million Americans who disagree with you that you are right.
The problem with American democracy is that Americans love to boast about how hard it is to change the system (Check and Balances, Balance of Powers, etc. are designed so that cruft is inevitable and virtually impossible to eliminate), but don't understand that this means it is fucking hard to change the fucking system. It will take years of work, during which you will see absolutely no change.
Just ask the Ron Paullies. They are succeeding in bringing their issues to the GOP. Their reward is the least effective Senator.
His point isn't just that Snowden didn't release any data on Russia, it's that Snowden a) fled to Russia (when he could have fled other countries), b) released no data on Russia's operations, c) claims that his sole concern is privacy rights, d) most of the information he has actually released has nothing to do with privacy rights for anybody (no government official has an actual right not to be spied on by other governments, but we spent about a week on Slashdot debating US and Australian spying on Indonesia, and Snowden's also released info on our operations in the Afpak theatre), and e) Russia is a country that has no privacy rights for anybody.
That's consistent with publicity hound who wants to be the most photographed man in the country, it is not consistent with ethical whistle-blowing.
He'd have access to what the NSA stole from Russia or China.
The biggest concern with any Russian or Chinese documents is what the NSA's having them reveals about the American intelligence capabilities and operations. A public release of such documents, while embarrassing to Russia and China, might be even more damaging to US intelligence, and might possibly expose people working for the US.
This is the only valid reason for him not to have released those documents.
If he had Australia's operations in Indonesia he has everything the NSA has ever done in relation to the Russians.
But a *public* release hasn't happened. Instead, Snowden spent several days in the Russian consulate before being allowed into Russia. What did he do to convince the Russians to let him in? If *you* were the Russian foreign ministry, how would *you* handle this? It's a legitimate question.
I'd get the Russia docs. I'd make it clear that no other country would be allowed to get Ed Snowden alive as long as I didn't have those documents, and then I'd offer Snowden a deal he couldn't refuse.
Part of the deal would be a detailed list of everyone who has received those documents, including contact info so that I could make it known to all of them that Russia has plenty of Polonium and very few scruples.
I don't know if Ed Snowden intended to betray his country to the Russians when he started, but I also don't believe for a second that he had a choice in the matter after he touched down in the Moscow airport. Hell he probably didn't have a choice when he was in Hong Kong. If he'd taken a direct flight to Ecuador it would have been a lot safer, and I'd be a lot more likely to join the Pardon bandwagon.
If Snowden is to be pardoned, it has to be done on the basis that the good he did in revealing the NSA domestic spying program outweighs the damage he has done to our foreign intelligence, which may well be the case.
I find it's generally easier to figure out these complex moral debates (ie: is the good Snowden did enough to out-weigh the evil?) if you use an equivalent analogy. People already have strongly held views about Snowden, which are likely to influence their conclusion even if those views are wrong.
Snowden is accused of two things. One is exposing a program many claim is unconstitutional. Another is exposing a bunch of operations he should not have exposed, like our ops in Pakistan. The latter is a felony.
So the question is, it some dude committed a felony, and by doing so exposed another felony, how bad would the second felony have to be relative to the first for him to get off completely? For example If I'm "borrowing" a car for a joyride, and I find a murder victim in the back and immediately drive to the station and turn myself (and my corpse) in, will I get off? I'd guess I'd get leniency -- the Prosecutor probably wouldn't up-charge me and then insist on the maximum sentence for all the up-charges, and he might even down-charge me -- but I ain't getting off. Let's say I drive to a place I know the cops can find, then make an anonymous tip that there's a body in the car. I probably don't get leniency because cops really fucking hate it when you try to avoid punishment for your crimes. They tend not to be very sympathetic to people who avoid punishment.
If you're of the opinion that the NSA surveillance is one of the most oppressive things the US government could possibly do, then outing all those other operations and probably giving Putin and the Chinese a field guide to the NSA's operations in those countries can possibly be excused. If you think it's anything less then that a full pardon is not on the table.
Of course the most important people to this pardon are not us, or legal theorists, or even the police. The people who matter are a) Barrack Obama and b) his replacement in 2016. To an extent the populace at large matters (because Obama really wants them to like him, and his replacement will be chosen mostly because said populace likes said replacement), but the simple fact is the populace at large doesn't seem to care much about Ed Snowden.
'It may be telling that Snowden did not release — or at least the recipients of his cache haven't yet published — any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any other countries, especially Russia or China,'
Why would he have access to Russian or Chinese documents?
Because most of the NSA's job is to research foreign intel agencies, therefore it has to have some data on those agencies. Signals intelligence is all about reading the other guy's communications, and you can't really do that unless you have some idea what he's communicating about.
More relevant to Snowden his job was China. He gave presentations on China. He managed to find lots of info on Democracies whose intel agencies he wasn't supposed to be watching (like Australia), but jack-squat on the one that he was supposed to be watching. He did this mostly by acquiring usernames and passwords from people who were working with those democracies, which kinda implies that even if he didn't have access to the NSA's info on Russia officially he could have gotten it unofficially.
I can't think of a reason a rational person would think he could out ALL our intelligence operations to literally everyone (including the Russians, Chinese, and Al Qaeda), and he'd get a pardon because some subset of those operations annoy people. I suspect he didn't think that. He feared Russian and Chinese assassins more then he feared US warrants, therefore he didn't out their operations; and now even if he's got 0% chance of getting a pardon his only play is to ask for one.
Like all political terms "minority" and "majority" really depend on context. The terms may have mathematical roots, but they aren't used in strictly mathematical terms. With gender the math gets really tricky because the numbers start virtually equal, and women's small advantage is mostly due to our science knowing how to keep them around a couple more years.
In the context of feminism, women are a minority because a lot of the issues facing them are more similar to the issues facing minorities those facing majorities. The boss doesn't plan in terms of their issues unless they make sure to complain about their issues. For Orthodox Jews it would not be surprising if a almost entirely Christian HR department tried to to schedule them after sundown on Friday, or insist they nobody has to use vacation on Christmas, but Jews have to use a vacation day if they need time off to prepare the Passover Seder. The problem isn't that that the HR Department wants to be mean to their Orthodox Jews, it's just that unless there's a) an Orthodox Jew, or b) a Reform Jew or gentile in the decision-making process the decision-makers aren't going to consider their point-of-view. Moreover since Executives tend to promote people who are a lot like them, and Orthodox Jews make a point of being their own little group, it's very hard for an Orthodox Jew to get promoted past a certain level. They just can't bond with the Baptists who run the place the same way an Anglican could.
The same kind of thing happens to women a lot. In particular the silver-haired dudes who make insurance decisions never buy a policy that doesn't cover Viagra (which they all use), but generally don't bother to ask whether The Pill is covered (why would they need that? the wife hit 40 back in the Bush years, and doesn't admit which Bush). The bosses love a game that rewards arm strength, and practice (golf), which means the women have to practice a lot more then men to be competitive, which is not fun for them. Maternity leave is handled really weird in the US and nobody wants to change it except a few feminists that everyone else ignores, etc.
It all adds up to more women being qualified for Fortune 500 C-Level jobs then men (because they have more college education), but less then 10% of those jobs go to women.
It could easily switch around. Female dominance of higher ed is relatively recent, so a lot of those people with paper qualifications for a C-Level job don't have the work experience yet, which could easily mean that 10 years from now guys vanish from the upper echelons of corporate leadership as they can't bond with the new Millennial women who run things; but right now "women's issues" get treated as something you only pay attention to at election time, whereas as "men's issues" are just issues.
The NSA isn't extrapolating solely from an FB account. They've got all kinds of other records. That's kinda why privacy advocates are pissed at them. Moreover they don't respond to one of their guys thinking "hey that shit look suspicious," by sending asking for a warrant to arrest you, they do it by sending their info to the FBI/DoJ where somebody who can interpret Facebook profiles can decide what to do. In other words even if the NSA guy has no idea when Arab pro-Palestinean rhetoric should scare him, and when it's just something somebody says because they're venting about the total lack of a peace treaty, odds are somebody else in the system can.
OTOH these headhunters will see a pic of a dude with cheap alcohol, and instead of thinking "hey this guy is just like me when I was his age, I'll bet he parties as hard as he works" they'll think "this dude is a thug," and *poof* his chance of landing the job goes to zero. They don't send the account to some other guy. They don't even know whether this particular account belongs to the guy they're headhunting. Black names sound unique, but an awful lot of them are just different combinations of the same have-dozen or so syllables (Tre-, -von-, -dre, De-, and Del- are all very popular; I know a Delvonte) plus a little creative spelling; so you can't be sure. Just look at all the social media accounts for guys named Trayvon Martin from Florida.
Slashdot Mirror
Ecuador. Venezuela. Cuba. That's just in Latin America. South Africa and India have never been our puppets. Quite a few countries near Hong Kong are not susceptible to US pressure. It's not like the Vietnamese remember us with fondness.
And keep in mind that he chose Hong Kong to start the saga. He wasn't forced to go there by the FBI. He knows Chinese, and HK is one of the few places Chinese is spoken that can called both a Democracy and not a US ally, so that's a sensible reason to pick Hong Kong, but why go through Moscow when you're leaving? Hell, why leave at all?
I'm not saying I have evidence he betrayed us to Russia and should be shot on sight, what I'm saying is there's no way to rule this out as long as he's in Russia and his leaks seem focused on outing the US and Five Eyes rather then the Russians.
Keep in mind that we still don't have the minutes of the Constitutional Convention, that the Federal right to classify information is enshrined in the Constitution, and that the "government by the people, and for the people," guy kept loads of secrets, etc.
Americans are very naive in believing that the main point of the Constitution is to protect freedom. That's BS. The main point is to protect these United States from other, nastier governments. Whenever there's a conflict between freedom and that goal the Constitution is firmly on the side of government, which is why they had to enact those Amendments in the Bill of Rights.
Of course the US population wants us to spy on every country. We are not some pansy Aristocratic Monarchy which only wins through honorable behavior. We are the United States, and we win because we cheat. George Washington never won a fair fight in his life. Bobby Lee fought fair, and lost half his Army to a guy who didn't fight at all (Bill Sherman), and the other half to a guy (Grant) who won mostly by knowing the best place to throw bodies. So the American people don't think we should stop tapping foreign leaders phones. We get kinda embarrassed about Angie Merkell because she seems like a nice lady and we don't want to remind her of the Stasi, but we won't stop tapping her phone. We are America, our unofficial motto is "trust, but verify", we will cheat our asses off (just ask the American Indians, there's a reason they gave up on reforming us and became citizens in the 20s), and if you don't like it you should probably support a European superstate because that's the only thing that can stop us.
Now if you did a poll and asked about mass data collection I doubt Americans would put it in the same "of course we cheat" category, but this article isn't about arresting Snowden for the mass data collection. It's about the spying on foreign officials, outing our techniques in Pakistan, etc. And that shit is firmly in "of course we cheat."
I think you're being unfair to Kaplan here.
If a police officer hears about a suspect who claims to have acted from altruistic motives, but also said his action happened 6-7 years after he was first horrified by the bad shit; he's gonna be incredibly skeptical. It just sounds like something a bad guy would say to get off. If it's three months he's gonna trust that story more.
So, yeah, Kaplan could have been a shade more accurate. But he didn't shade the truth to support his point.
Just another example of American exceptionalism: Snowden should not have divulged America's illegal activities outside the US because we're special; we can do no wrong. What a bunch of self-righteous bigots.
Apparently you didn't read the article. He explicitly said he didn't give a shit one way or the other about Snowden's revelations of illegal activity. And he's actually more extreme then you are because he included spying on non-Americans as "illegal."
The problem is that most of what Snowden revealed is legal, even in his sense of the term. The US government's job is to know what other governments are doing, therefore it has the power to spy on them. They, in turn, have the power to spy on it. We can argue the ethics of tapping Angie Merkel's phone all day, but you can't argue that there is a single law which gives a Head of Government the right not to be spied on.
If you ignore the fact that the "islamists" are mostly fighting the US with the arms the US gave them then what you say almost makes sense.
Almost.
#1 That's not as true as you imply. All Taliban and Iraqi insurgent arms are Soviet-made. Some proportion of those were paid for with U$, but that was generally decades ago when we were fighting another war with a much different enemy.
#2 That's not uncommon with insurgent movements. While we were fighting in 'Nam with heavily armored vehicles the Portuguese were fighting in their African colonies with horse cavalry. In both wars most weapons used by the rebels were originally "acquired" from government sources, so the Portuguese faced significantly less firepower then us. In some ways it would have made a lot more sense for us to arm the South Vietnamese with Pre-WW2 weapons and not send in our boys with M-16s, but it's very hard for a Democracy to send troops into battle with inferior equipment. Their families tend to object.
The problem with that strategy is geography doesn't protect against little raids like S11, the Islamists seem to have strong support in their own countries, and certain bits of Western culture (notably the fact that sex is everywhere and women are empowered) enrage them.
In other words if we're annoying them with a constant barrage of Beyonce from VoA they ain't gonna bother conquering the Swedes, they will join Al Qaeda.
"Single logical state?"
You do realize this is real life, not a circuit? It doesn't have a logical state. It's analog, and messy, and we have to deal with it using our mushy monkey-brains as best we can.
And with all that highfaluting thinking, you missed Kaplan's main point:
You don't grant a guy clemency until you know what he's accused of doing.
And we don't know that Snowden didn't intend to end up in Russia. We don't know that he is telling the truth when he assures us he hasn't told the Russians jack-squat. If he did tell the Russians things we don't know if they tortured him or not. We can't know that shit until after he's someplace we trust, answering some very detailed questions for the Feds.
What we do know is that he chose a flight that went through Russia, he chose not to reveal any information on Russian spying but to reveal pretty much every spy operation the US has ever done, and we know that while hiding out in a country whose definition of "freedom" is only jailing you for a year instead of two he's claiming he did all these things solely to protect freedom.
The author has actually supported several of the leaks.
His problems are the leaks about US spy operations on various non-US governments, which are perfectly legal; and revelations about information-gathering in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
And you're totally ignoring one of his main points:
If Snowden is in Russia, and the Russians can threaten to shoot him (or even just send him back to the US), why would we believe him that he hasn't snitched on our Russian assets to them? Given that he chose to go there, and he hasn't hampered their operations at all despite the fact he clearly had access to that information (the NSA's job is to recognize enemy signals, which means they have to have info on the signals the Russians send when they spy on us, which in turn means the NSA has to know pretty much every Russian spy op we suspect); why is everyone assuming he is telling the Gospel truth?
I'm not saying he should be charged, but there definitely needs to be an investigation. And until the investigation happens clemency would be silly.
Of course it's illegal to give anyone who is not currently on active duty the "Bradley Manning treatment." If you read the Constitution the Fifth amendment explicitly do not apply to AD troops.
A major reason I'm skeptical of privacy advocates is they claim to be defending our Constitutional system, but all of them act shocked that an AD soldier had fewer Constitutional rights then OJ Simpson, despite the fact the actual Constitution is explicitly designed to deny AD soldiers those rights.
Some of the revelations, however, while detailing operations that are technically legal, do paint the organzation in a light that shows it to be an unchecked body with too much power and not enough supervision.
The NSA is perfectly within control of the President and the Judges the Chief Justice has appointed to the FISA Court. It is following the will of most of Congress.
It's not the NSA's fault that you think the people in control are wrong.
The specific examples listed in the article may not be under the above category. Still, it is not clear who did the sifting through and filtering the material to decide what gets published. If Snowden did none of it, than those can be chalcked down to "collateral damage". If the bulk of the material is relevant for a whistle blower, I'd still go with clemancy.
Clearly you're not a cop. Snowden released all kinds of info that will hurt the US. Some if it protects your privacy rights. Most of it simply forced various foreign governments to pretend they didn't know they were being spied on. these governments clearly don't like that he released the info because only a handful of them will even consider giving him Asylum.
Shachar
P.s.
Not that I, as a non-US citizen, or even resident, have a real say on the matter.
One of the annoying things about being American is that everyone insists that a) their country, which is too small to do anything, is moral because it's too small to hurt anyone; b) America must do something about everything; and c) what America has done is clearly BS and thank God I'm in a small country that can never do anything. In this case America was given the thorny problem of leading the world in a war against Terrorists, which is rather difficult because they hide, and the world is extremely unhappy that the solution to finding them involved storing lots of data.
I'm not saying that the solution the NSA picked is optimal or even acceptable. I'm just saying that it is a huge pain in the ass that everyone insists that we do every-goddamn-thing and then acts all morally superior because sometimes when you do shit it turns out wrong.
If you want your country to be as influential as America you can easily get that. You just have to be willing to give up the smallish country you live in for a larger country. A European Super-state would have more claim to global leadership then the US. A Latin American superstate would be nearly as powerful as the US.
The disadvantage is that you'd actually have to do stuff, which means that a) you'd have to buy expensive military hardware instead of F-16s which were designed to be second-line aircraft in the 70s, and b) some of the stuff you did would turn out wrong and everyone would yell at you.
That's possible.
But there're plenty of places to flee that are neither Russia, nor American friends. Greenwald is quite happy in Brazil. Lots of Latin American states are both significantly freer then Russia and would be very happy to piss on Obama with Snowden.
Kaplan's point isn't that Snowden's presence in Russia is proof that he guilty of giving them information, he's saying it's enough that Snowden should be thoroughly investigated before being allowed back into the country. In legal terms rather then being "evidence beyond a reasonable doubt," it's "probable cause."
Since any statement he makes from Russia is difficult to trust (Putin could kill him tomorrow if he wanted), the investigation can't even start until he's back in the US, which means that saying "come back to the US for amnesty" is really premature.
What good is a trusted friend if a visit from the Russian FSB can't convince him that you would be better off if he told them the password?
No, he chose to take *himself* to China and Russia, and I can't say I blame him.
Except they didn't, because Snowden didn't take his files with him, at least not unencrypted.
So you're saying that because Snowden says "Putin's men did not threaten to castrate me if I didn't come up with an unencrypted thumb drive, therefore I didn't have Greenwald FedEx me one" then he clearly hasn't done that shit?
Kaplan's point isn't that Snowden is an evil man who should be shot without trial, or even that he should be put on trial, it's that we have to have fairly lengthy and complex investigation, in which Snowden is clearly out of the control of Russia, before we can decide whether a trial is warranted.
Are you kidding? This is their best propaganda coup in the past twenty years. They're not going to screw it up even if they don't get access to Snowden's files.
What makes you think the propaganda coup gets worse for them if Snowden "disappears" on a day trip and re-appears at hearing in Federal Court?
about NSA surveillance of cellphone calls 'worldwide,' an effort that 'allows it to look for unknown associates of known intelligence targets by tracking people whose movements intersect.'
Yes, it's essential to national security that we "look for", identify, and if necessary kill, any and all "unknown associates" of Ms. Merkel!
It doesn't prove Snowden is in the right, but when the NSA's proponents can't string together one paragraph summarizing the "good" programs Snowden's compromised without this sort of thing, you can be pretty damn sure NSA is so far wrong it's not funny.
So you're saying Al Qaeda doesn't count as a "known intelligence target?" Wouldn't it make sense for the US to have a list of known AQ terrorists, and then when they detect a guy who spends time with multiple of those terrorists, maybe they should keep an eye on him? What about the KGB's successor the FSB?
The program Kaplan mentions is a lot more useful for those guys then monitoring Merkel because Merkel is a Head of Government. She's not gonna go to clandestine meetings herself.
Apparently you don't pay much attention to the details of this scandal.
The entire point of the NSA is Signals Intelligence. that means intercepting and decoding signals. You can't do that if you don't have some idea how the other guys operate, which means the NSA has to have some idea how the Russians and Chinese operate. Moreover Snowden was actually a guy they depended on to train their other guys on Chinese tactics. So Snowden doesn't actually need documents to say a lot about the Chinese, because it's in his head; and he could have gotten pelnty of docs on the Russians if he'd wanted.
Whether Snowden could release the info we have on them without destroying our intelligence apparatus is both countries is an interesting question, but it seems to me that if he wanted to hurt them he could release some fraction of what we've got as disinformation.
Bullshit.
Snowden is a civilian not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. He couldn't be sent to GitMo because he's never had direct contact with terrorists.
His trial would be in the US Courts, and it would be every bit the circus of OJ's trial.
Did you read your own source? Yeah the Feds TRIED to railroad Drake, but they lost. This is because we are not Russia and the Courts are not a rubberstamp.
So because Snowden did one thing you like then everything he did is by definition perfect?
And you're calling people who disagree with him on any issue "cock-sucking fud-spewing self-important minions"?
Do you actually support Snowden, or are you an NSA-planted Agent Provacatuer?
Not that I, as a non-US citizen, or even resident, have a real say on the matter.
Not that I, as a US citizen, have a real say on the matter either.
You have plenty of say.
It's just that to exercise that say you would have to convince several hundred million Americans who disagree with you that you are right.
The problem with American democracy is that Americans love to boast about how hard it is to change the system (Check and Balances, Balance of Powers, etc. are designed so that cruft is inevitable and virtually impossible to eliminate), but don't understand that this means it is fucking hard to change the fucking system. It will take years of work, during which you will see absolutely no change.
Just ask the Ron Paullies. They are succeeding in bringing their issues to the GOP. Their reward is the least effective Senator.
His point isn't just that Snowden didn't release any data on Russia, it's that Snowden a) fled to Russia (when he could have fled other countries), b) released no data on Russia's operations, c) claims that his sole concern is privacy rights, d) most of the information he has actually released has nothing to do with privacy rights for anybody (no government official has an actual right not to be spied on by other governments, but we spent about a week on Slashdot debating US and Australian spying on Indonesia, and Snowden's also released info on our operations in the Afpak theatre), and e) Russia is a country that has no privacy rights for anybody.
That's consistent with publicity hound who wants to be the most photographed man in the country, it is not consistent with ethical whistle-blowing.
He'd have access to what the NSA stole from Russia or China.
The biggest concern with any Russian or Chinese documents is what the NSA's having them reveals about the American intelligence capabilities and operations. A public release of such documents, while embarrassing to Russia and China, might be even more damaging to US intelligence, and might possibly expose people working for the US.
This is the only valid reason for him not to have released those documents.
If he had Australia's operations in Indonesia he has everything the NSA has ever done in relation to the Russians.
But a *public* release hasn't happened. Instead, Snowden spent several days in the Russian consulate before being allowed into Russia. What did he do to convince the Russians to let him in? If *you* were the Russian foreign ministry, how would *you* handle this? It's a legitimate question.
I'd get the Russia docs. I'd make it clear that no other country would be allowed to get Ed Snowden alive as long as I didn't have those documents, and then I'd offer Snowden a deal he couldn't refuse.
Part of the deal would be a detailed list of everyone who has received those documents, including contact info so that I could make it known to all of them that Russia has plenty of Polonium and very few scruples.
I don't know if Ed Snowden intended to betray his country to the Russians when he started, but I also don't believe for a second that he had a choice in the matter after he touched down in the Moscow airport. Hell he probably didn't have a choice when he was in Hong Kong. If he'd taken a direct flight to Ecuador it would have been a lot safer, and I'd be a lot more likely to join the Pardon bandwagon.
If Snowden is to be pardoned, it has to be done on the basis that the good he did in revealing the NSA domestic spying program outweighs the damage he has done to our foreign intelligence, which may well be the case.
I find it's generally easier to figure out these complex moral debates (ie: is the good Snowden did enough to out-weigh the evil?) if you use an equivalent analogy. People already have strongly held views about Snowden, which are likely to influence their conclusion even if those views are wrong.
Snowden is accused of two things. One is exposing a program many claim is unconstitutional. Another is exposing a bunch of operations he should not have exposed, like our ops in Pakistan. The latter is a felony.
So the question is, it some dude committed a felony, and by doing so exposed another felony, how bad would the second felony have to be relative to the first for him to get off completely? For example If I'm "borrowing" a car for a joyride, and I find a murder victim in the back and immediately drive to the station and turn myself (and my corpse) in, will I get off? I'd guess I'd get leniency -- the Prosecutor probably wouldn't up-charge me and then insist on the maximum sentence for all the up-charges, and he might even down-charge me -- but I ain't getting off. Let's say I drive to a place I know the cops can find, then make an anonymous tip that there's a body in the car. I probably don't get leniency because cops really fucking hate it when you try to avoid punishment for your crimes. They tend not to be very sympathetic to people who avoid punishment.
If you're of the opinion that the NSA surveillance is one of the most oppressive things the US government could possibly do, then outing all those other operations and probably giving Putin and the Chinese a field guide to the NSA's operations in those countries can possibly be excused. If you think it's anything less then that a full pardon is not on the table.
Of course the most important people to this pardon are not us, or legal theorists, or even the police. The people who matter are a) Barrack Obama and b) his replacement in 2016. To an extent the populace at large matters (because Obama really wants them to like him, and his replacement will be chosen mostly because said populace likes said replacement), but the simple fact is the populace at large doesn't seem to care much about Ed Snowden.
'It may be telling that Snowden did not release — or at least the recipients of his cache haven't yet published — any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any other countries, especially Russia or China,'
Why would he have access to Russian or Chinese documents?
Because most of the NSA's job is to research foreign intel agencies, therefore it has to have some data on those agencies. Signals intelligence is all about reading the other guy's communications, and you can't really do that unless you have some idea what he's communicating about.
More relevant to Snowden his job was China. He gave presentations on China. He managed to find lots of info on Democracies whose intel agencies he wasn't supposed to be watching (like Australia), but jack-squat on the one that he was supposed to be watching. He did this mostly by acquiring usernames and passwords from people who were working with those democracies, which kinda implies that even if he didn't have access to the NSA's info on Russia officially he could have gotten it unofficially.
I can't think of a reason a rational person would think he could out ALL our intelligence operations to literally everyone (including the Russians, Chinese, and Al Qaeda), and he'd get a pardon because some subset of those operations annoy people. I suspect he didn't think that. He feared Russian and Chinese assassins more then he feared US warrants, therefore he didn't out their operations; and now even if he's got 0% chance of getting a pardon his only play is to ask for one.
Like all political terms "minority" and "majority" really depend on context. The terms may have mathematical roots, but they aren't used in strictly mathematical terms. With gender the math gets really tricky because the numbers start virtually equal, and women's small advantage is mostly due to our science knowing how to keep them around a couple more years.
In the context of feminism, women are a minority because a lot of the issues facing them are more similar to the issues facing minorities those facing majorities. The boss doesn't plan in terms of their issues unless they make sure to complain about their issues. For Orthodox Jews it would not be surprising if a almost entirely Christian HR department tried to to schedule them after sundown on Friday, or insist they nobody has to use vacation on Christmas, but Jews have to use a vacation day if they need time off to prepare the Passover Seder. The problem isn't that that the HR Department wants to be mean to their Orthodox Jews, it's just that unless there's a) an Orthodox Jew, or b) a Reform Jew or gentile in the decision-making process the decision-makers aren't going to consider their point-of-view. Moreover since Executives tend to promote people who are a lot like them, and Orthodox Jews make a point of being their own little group, it's very hard for an Orthodox Jew to get promoted past a certain level. They just can't bond with the Baptists who run the place the same way an Anglican could.
The same kind of thing happens to women a lot. In particular the silver-haired dudes who make insurance decisions never buy a policy that doesn't cover Viagra (which they all use), but generally don't bother to ask whether The Pill is covered (why would they need that? the wife hit 40 back in the Bush years, and doesn't admit which Bush). The bosses love a game that rewards arm strength, and practice (golf), which means the women have to practice a lot more then men to be competitive, which is not fun for them. Maternity leave is handled really weird in the US and nobody wants to change it except a few feminists that everyone else ignores, etc.
It all adds up to more women being qualified for Fortune 500 C-Level jobs then men (because they have more college education), but less then 10% of those jobs go to women.
It could easily switch around. Female dominance of higher ed is relatively recent, so a lot of those people with paper qualifications for a C-Level job don't have the work experience yet, which could easily mean that 10 years from now guys vanish from the upper echelons of corporate leadership as they can't bond with the new Millennial women who run things; but right now "women's issues" get treated as something you only pay attention to at election time, whereas as "men's issues" are just issues.
The NSA isn't extrapolating solely from an FB account. They've got all kinds of other records. That's kinda why privacy advocates are pissed at them. Moreover they don't respond to one of their guys thinking "hey that shit look suspicious," by sending asking for a warrant to arrest you, they do it by sending their info to the FBI/DoJ where somebody who can interpret Facebook profiles can decide what to do. In other words even if the NSA guy has no idea when Arab pro-Palestinean rhetoric should scare him, and when it's just something somebody says because they're venting about the total lack of a peace treaty, odds are somebody else in the system can.
OTOH these headhunters will see a pic of a dude with cheap alcohol, and instead of thinking "hey this guy is just like me when I was his age, I'll bet he parties as hard as he works" they'll think "this dude is a thug," and *poof* his chance of landing the job goes to zero. They don't send the account to some other guy. They don't even know whether this particular account belongs to the guy they're headhunting. Black names sound unique, but an awful lot of them are just different combinations of the same have-dozen or so syllables (Tre-, -von-, -dre, De-, and Del- are all very popular; I know a Delvonte) plus a little creative spelling; so you can't be sure. Just look at all the social media accounts for guys named Trayvon Martin from Florida.
If you want to have more power then choosing Bland D or Bland R you have to join one of the huge 150+ coalitions and vote in primaries.
I really need a proof-reader. This should read "huge 150 million+ coalition."